Tethered Swimming

“You’re not just putting the new newspapers over the old ones, are you?” - Marge Simpson

On Tuesday John McCain won the New Hampshire primary for the second time this decade.  There has been much fretting on the left that, in the national race, he would be the most formidable opponent the Reds could nominate.  As someone who is fervently hoping for a massive Blue victory in November I have only one thing to say: please nominate this man.

In December of 2003, shortly before the last New Hampshire primary, the National Review ran a cover photo of an angry Howard Dean over the headline “Please Nominate this Man”.  It ran after Dean’s inevitability had peaked and begun to crack, but before his campaign died in Iowa and New Hampshire.  The basic point was that an anti-war candidate was doomed to failure in 2004.  The war was less than a year old and Saddam Hussein had just been captured.  War supporters were riding high and the denial about what was really going on was so widespread that the US Government was still refusing to use the word “insurgency” to describe the ballooning chaos between the rivers.

Flash forward four years, the war is still going on but we are at a similar moment of delusion for war supporters.  Iraq has receded from the headlines somewhat and the conventional political wisdom is that the war has become, or at the very least is becoming, a secondary issue.  The fashionable new topic is the economy, stupid.  The word “recession” is on the tip of many tongues and, the thinking goes, should the economy actually shrink in 2008 it would become the dominant issue almost by default.  This line of thinking is myopic, at best; the war isn’t going anywhere.

The temporary lessening of American deaths combined with a stunning lack of long term memory has put the national political conversation at ease over the war as an issue.  We’ve had more turning points and hopeful moments in Iraq that you can count and every single one of them has proved to be illusory.  This is just another mirage and it too will fade.

I’m not even going out on a limb when I say that.  It is a mathematical certainty.  All those extra troops we sent over there last year are beginning to come home.  We scraped the bottom of the barrel to muster even that force and it’s not sustainable.  The Iraq they leave is a different place than the one they found, but probably not for the better.

First and foremost there is the fact that we’ve been paying and arming groups that used to be shooting at us.  In the short term there have been benefits to this policy, after all they aren’t shooting at us (as much).  In the long term though, giving money and guns to Sunni groups which are fundamentally opposed to the Shiite government in the Green Zone sure doesn’t seem like a good idea.  Speaking of that government, the one that’s been sequestered inside the Green Zone since its conception, it’s as dysfunctional and powerless as ever.  There are numerous other problems as well, a massive and growing refugee population (internal and external), a lack of legitimate economic activity coupled with rampant criminality of every imaginable stripe, a distraught oil sector, and the daily butcher’s bill of civilian deaths to name but a few.

The increase in American troop levels that has probably caused the reduction in violence is, by design and necessity, temporary.  Other than blind hope there is no reason to believe that any structural progress has been made.  As our troops begin standing down and rotating home they are leaving an Iraq that is, if it’s even possible, probably more factionalized and more heavily armed than it was a year ago.  That unfortunate country has more problems than even a well informed American can keep up with, to say nothing of the average man on the street.

Which brings us back to John McCain.  Of the men most likely to win the Republican nomination, McCain has, by far, the most pro-war record.  Rudy Giuliani is a distant second and Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have barely articulated a position on the war beyond meaningless platitudes about victory.  McCain, on the other hand, is an enthusiastic war supporter who just last Sunday went so far as to state that he would’ve invaded Iraq even knowing that there were no massive weapons to be found.

Last summer, when the, ahem, surge, didn’t look so rosy McCain’s campaign all but collapsed.  Yes he made some internal mistakes and personnel shakeups within a campaign are always played in the press as a death rattle, but McCain had done all he could to assume ownership of Mr. Bush’s war and it looked like political death.  That’s why it’s all I can do not to laugh when I hear people say that McCain would be at an advantage against someone like Hillary Clinton in a general election because the press loves him and hates her.

The byline brigade’s infatuation with McCain isn’t as justified as they would have you believe, but it isn’t as unjustified as liberal pundits say.  McCain really is honest, by political standards anyway, and he seems even more so when sharing a stage with the unchecked and barely disguised dishonesty of Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney.  But the reporter’s love of McCain was not powerful enough to stem the tide of negative stories about him being out of touch when the war tanked last summer.  And when the war tanks again, and it will, McCain will still be right there, up to his eyeballs in Iraq statements that the majority of the country finds abhorrent.

For the record I still don’t think McCain will be the nominee.  He’s almost as old as Bob Dole was in ‘96 and winning in New Hampshire doesn’t change the fact that he has, to this point, been a mediocre national campaigner.  I hope I’m wrong about that though, because I know I’m right about everything else.